Wednesday, October 14, 2009

In Which I Cry Like A Little Girl

So, I've decided to leave my *ahem* finished book as it is and not try to tweak it too much. If anything, I'm going to rock star it out and finish my current WIP in the next 3-4 weeks. Like Mr. Veen here, I can knock out some words when I feel like it.

Slight digression, this is why NaNoWriMo never seems like much of a challenge to me....50k words in a month? Whatever, sucka.

So, yeah - new WIP. Exciting times, everybody's cheering and all that. But as I've gotten back a couple rejections (5 now), I've learned a couple things about my book.

1.) It is a difficult sell in the YA market for a number of different reasons. One agent suggested I re-write a couple of scenes and submit to a agents who work in the adult fiction market. I've considered this before, but I'm pretty happy working in the YA genre so I don't expect to take this advice too much.

2.) There wasn't enough drama to pull various super-agents in. Again, I can see this. Most of the drama is a bit tongue-in-cheek, because the MC is a bit of a drama dude. He's created a life of drama revolving around something that happens to everybody at some point. Again, this 'quiet' drama is directly related to the premise of the book mentioned above (i.e. him living his life like he sees it happen in the movies...)

3.) I've bunched most of my drama into 3 chapters. It all just...happens like, bam. bam. bam. I did it intenionally after Mr. Veen (again) read an early draft and suggested I speed up the pacing of the book. I think I may have erred on the side of breakneck speed, folks....;)

4.) It is well-written and has a distinctive voice. This, of course, is good news. I think 'voice' and 'style' are the things that take the longest to master in writing. It is great to hear agents say things like "you are a powerful writer" and "it is obvious why this is garnering so much attention". Because that means, at least, I can find a bit of validation in the voice.

I really want to go back and fix some of this stuff. Like, REALLY badly. But I'm afraid I'm just too close to this particular MS. Of course, this is the ultimate Catch-22, right? I've got 3 agents reading the full and 1 reading a partial. Not to mention about 4 agents who haven't responded to my original query.

This writing gig can be a bit annoying at times.

So maybe this is the point in the story when I ask if anybody out there would like to read the m.s. - give me some perspective and a fresh set of eyes. Even though I'm going to be working on something else, it would be nice to get some opinions - harsh or not!